Big bind in the Big Easy

There are lots of jobs in New Orleans -- but few places for workers to live.

January 29, 2006|By Howard Witt, Chicago Tribune

NEW ORLEANS -- Home for Chuck Wonycott these days is a cramped metal bunk with a thin foam mattress deep in the bowels of a merchant-marine ship docked at the Port of New Orleans. His closet is a narrow locker. His dining room is the ship's mess. His bathroom resembles a bus station's.

It's a long way from the comfortable home he shared with his aunt in eastern New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina filled it with 5 feet of water. But Wonycott, 42, a waiter at Antoine's Restaurant who spent four terrifying days with his 83-year-old grandmother waiting to be rescued from the New Orleans Convention Center before ending up in Florida, figures things could be worse.

He still could be stranded far from New Orleans, like an estimated 300,000 residents scattered across the country nearly five months after the Aug. 29 storm because there's nowhere in their former city for them to live. And he could be unemployed: Fewer than 1,800 New Orleans businesses have reopened so far, out of more than 15,000 operating in the city before the hurricane.

"At least this is something -- a place I can stay so I can go back to work," Wonycott said one morning this month, ushering a visitor through the chilly room where the beds were stacked three high in rows a few feet apart. "Compared to the convention center, with dead bodies all around, this is an improvement."

This is company housing, Katrina-style. Ships, campers, trailer parks, hotel rooms, dormitories and factory floors -- all are being pressed into service as makeshift housing by New Orleans-area employers desperate to crack a vicious post-Katrina circle that is hobbling the city's recovery.

The economy can't rebound until more businesses can reopen. But businesses can't reopen until workers can return. And workers can't return until they have places to live in a city where 80 percent of the land area flooded when Katrina burst the floodwalls and ruined 110,000 houses.

It all adds up to a labor paradox: The New Orleans unemployment rate rose to 17.5 percent in November even as clothing stores, fast food restaurants and delivery companies are offering thousands of dollars in signing bonuses to fill vacant positions. So scrambled are the region's demographics that the available workers and the open jobs just don't match up.

"You have a lack of housing in the New Orleans area, utilities out in a good portion of the city, people looking for schools for their children; you don't have day care or transportation," said Ed Pratt, spokesman for the Louisiana Labor Department. "Those are just some of the reasons why people are staying put where they are and not going home."

Many employers say they've given up waiting for government agencies to solve the housing problem. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, for example, has received about 24,000 requests for travel trailers in New Orleans, but as of about two weeks ago had placed just 3,075, according to city officials.

Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco, meanwhile, had to step in to mediate a feud between New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who wants to set up temporary trailer parks throughout the city to house returning residents, and members of the City Council, who don't want those trailers in their backyards.

So businesses, civic groups and entrepreneurs have begun to tackle the housing crisis themselves.

"Forget the government," said Warren Reuther, president of the New Orleans Exhibition Hall Authority, who is leading an effort to create a trailer-home Hospitality Village beneath the Crescent City Bridge to house key service workers in the tourism industry. "You can't wait for the federal government to do everything for you. If you do, then when something happens and they're not around, you're going to die."

Habitat for Humanity is planning to build a Musicians' Village so displaced entertainers can fill the city with music. The Port of New Orleans has set up trailers for essential dockworkers. Carpenters are living inside the ruined houses they are rebuilding.

The Sheraton Hotel, which like many of its counterparts is using some of its rooms to house its own employees, has devoted one manager to the full-time job of searching out rental apartments for homeless staff members.

And some employees of Antoine's, one of the city's oldest and most recognizable restaurants, are living on a grimy merchant freighter arranged for by the Louisiana Restaurant Association to provide bunks for the dishwashers, cooks, bartenders and waiters every restaurant urgently needs.

"I thought for sure the government at some level would have solved my problems for me, but since that doesn't look like it's going to happen, we have to go this route," said Rick Blount, the restaurant's chief executive officer, whose struggle to revive his family's 166-year-old French Quarter landmark mirrors New Orleans' effort to rebound from Hurricane Katrina.

"If our employees had the resources to solve their own problems, they would," Blount said. "If they are going to be able to help us, we have to help them first."